30 Nov It’s Giving Tuesday! Let’s Check-In

By Jackie Sue Griffin, MBA, MS

So, how is your Giving Tuesday going? Checking in and noting how you feel things are going now—today—is your best form of advance planning for next year. Here are a few gut-check questions to answer this week and file in your 2022 Giving Tuesday folder.

• Did you start planning early enough? Message planning can start as early as June—particularly if you involve a committee. And you can begin rolling out teasers as early as October. Of course, you’ll want all campaign graphics designed, approved and waiting in the wings well in advance of the day itself.
• Did you have a solid campaign theme that made message planning easy?
• Were you concentrating on one clear way your donor’s gifts on GT would make a difference? Or did you take a scattershot approach and give each program or service some attention all day?
• Did you develop your messaging and graphics early enough to share with your audience and brand ambassadors? Or were you winging it the day of?
• Did you have exciting visuals: photos and videos? What could you do once each month over the next year to make sure you have plenty of these on hand? (Spend one Friday a month collecting outstanding photos and captions/mini testimonials into a dedicated folder. Commit to finding one volunteer, client, staff member to participate in a one-question video interview on a dedicated topic you can use now—and again for Giving Tuesday.)
• Did you have an hour-by-hour plan for the day? Were multiple people given straightforward tasks, or were you working solo all day trying to cover it all?
• Did your day-of plan include donor recognition? Who wouldn’t like to be tagged and publicly thanks for their generosity? Did a large corporation or recognizable brand/figure make a gift? Tagging them gets your message in front of their followers as well (hello, bigger audience!)
• Were the right people involved at the right times? Did planning get bogged down in committee? Can you streamline that? Did the committee start too late? Did your CEO have changes “at the last minute” because they hadn’t seen the plan early on?
• Were the brand ambassadors you engaged…engaging? Did they share your messages with their own exciting calls to action? Or just hit the “share” or “retweet” buttons? Did they mobilize like-minded friends by tagging them?
• What was the best response to one of your ambassadors’ efforts? What can you learn from that? How can you replicate it next year?
• What about staff involvement? Was there any by anyone not explicitly assigned to the GT team? What were their results? If they didn’t engage, why not? Did you tell them how they could and what impact they could have?

This list isn’t exhaustive, of course; there are plenty of great gut-check questions you can ask yourself NOW to make sure GT ’22 is your best ever!

In fact, we’d love it if you’d share your most effective campaign gut-check questions or observations over on our social media (links below)! Let’s hash it out together!

Here at JSG & Associates, we support the passionate leaders who make nonprofits successful. For more information about us, visit our website.